Final Reflections

"How was it?!" It's the easiest hardest most ubiquitous question to answer after an adventure like study abroad. Easy, because "It was great!" is the quick summative and socially normative, often eventually true response people want to hear. An awkward pause follows. A quick, mental swear word. Of course, the asker expects to hear more. You didn't prepare. What do they want to hear about? How do I support my claim? You choose a couple key takeaways, maybe show a picture or two. But no matter what you choose to describe, or how you describe it, it feels flat. You can't do justice to the experience in two sentences, and anyways, you're still processing it yourself. 

My overarching reaction to this study abroad experience is 1) that I feel incredibly lucky to have had this opportunity, and 2) the last time a class impacted me so much, it was when I learned (from high school physics) that magic (electricity and magnetism) exists. I couldn't believe the scale of bicycling infrastructure and scale of use. I couldn't believe that what I was seeing was the result of just 50 years' worth of transportation policy decisions. What I experienced in the Netherlands completely shifted my idea of what constitutes "good" multimodal design. In the US, we are taught that bike lanes support bicyclists, and that we can pat ourselves on the back for a multimodal job well done if there's a facility for everyone. Where active travel is concerned, we don't look so much at whether that facility is comfortable, or easy to use. We don't inspire people to use it by designing for what people actually want. As someone who hovers between an "interested but concerned" to "enthused and confident" bicyclist, I am very well aware of what provided bicycle facilities I won't touch because I don't feel safe using them. It was truly eye-opening to see the Dutch translate knowledge about what truly constitutes a comfortable bicycling experience for everyone into their standard design practice, and realize that we don't have to re-invent the wheel here in the US. 

People like to say that the US is different--and there is some truth to that--yet there are so many elements of good bicycle design demonstrated in Dutch bicycling infrastructure that I know we can transfer here. Their model is inspiring, and it is extra inspiring when one considers that all of this infrastructure resulted from a confluence of events less than 50 years ago, when the Netherlands, like the US was trending towards a city model dominated by cars. 

In sum, this experience has had an enormous impact on me, and I hope it continues to inspire generations of students interested in transportation. To everyone who organized and facilitated this experience for us students, thank you!